"What are you going to do with that degree?"
I've had this conversation so many times. "So, you're going to teach, right?"
Now, I possess neither the skill of teaching nor the desire to. I have a perpetual fear of children.
English degrees open up to so much more than just teaching. I'm looking at careers in communications, fashion, journalism, PR, to name a few. You wouldn't assume someone doing a science degree wants to be a science teacher - you'd think "doctor" or "microbiologist" or even, for the narrower minded among us, "scientist"!
I love texts. I love reading about them; I love writing about them, but I don't want to teach them. I want to make them.
English is one of those subjects that, from the outside, seems confined within the boundaries of education. The transferrable skills aren't explicit and the modules offered sometimes make it understandable why - Renaissance Drama doesn't exactly say "fashion columnist material".
When people assume what my future career is it makes my skin crawl. It's the conversation equivalent of running your fingernails down a blackboard. I'm getting bored of hiding the grimace I pull whenever someone utters the first "tee-" syllable.
Studying English is about discussion and discovery. So talk to me about my future career and you'll discover your ideas about it are very wrong.
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